"A Circadian Gene Atlas in Mammals: Implications for Biology and Medicine," will be presented by John Hogenesch of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine at 4 p.m., Sept. 30 in E103 Beadle Center. The seminar is free and open to the public.
The circadian clock regulates daily rhythms in behavior and physiology throughout the body. Many groups have sought to characterize clock-regulated gene expression as a way to understand its tissue specific roles. However, most of these studies focused on one or two organs. Here we report a survey of the mouse from 12 separate brain regions and organs using both DNA arrays at 2 hr resolution and RNA-seq at 6 hr resolution. We find that 43 percent of the protein encoding transcriptome is clock regulated, including the majority of human disease genes and drug targets, including targets for 56 of the top 100 best selling drugs.
Most of these transcripts peak in anticipation of dusk and dawn in transcriptional "rush hours." We also find that conserved ncRNAs are substantially more like to cycle than non-conserved ncRNAs. We describe and use a new method, Phase Set Enrichment, which is optimized to detect pathway level enrichment for periodic data. Collectively, these results highlight the importance of the circadian clock and suggest ways to leverage biological time in medicine.
The Beadle Center is located at 1901 Vine Street. The complete schedule of seminars may be found at http://biotech.unl.edu/.
More details at: http://go.unl.edu/pn4e